Carly Fiorina has surged in the polls after her strong performance in the so-called kiddie debate — the debate for candidates who weren’t in the top 10 in public opinion polls to qualify for the main Fox News debate on Aug. 6. She has moved up to sixth place in the Huffington Post Pollster average.

But that still might not be enough to get into the next debate for the top 10 candidates, on Sept. 16 on CNN.

CNN will choose the 10 candidates who lead in an average of select live interview national polls conducted between July 16 and Sept. 10.

The problem for Mrs. Fiorina? That will include nine polls before the first presidential debate, when she held virtually no support in the polls.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there had been more polls since that first debate on Fox News.

The Huffington Post average includes 13 polls conducted since her well-received performance, but only three of those polls — from Fox News, CNN and Quinnipiac — count under the CNN average. That measure includes only national, live interview polls from the following organizations: ABC/The Washington Post, Bloomberg, CBS/The New York Times, CNN, FOX, Gallup, Marist, McClatchy, Monmouth University, NBC/The Wall Street Journal, Pew, Quinnipiac, USA Today and Time.

Fiorina’s Poll Problem

Carly Fiorina is doing better than Chris Christie in post-debate polls, but not by enough to get into the debate without a lot more polling.

Number of polls before CNN deadline→

↑ How much Fiorina needs to beat Christie

Fiorina’s post-debate lead over Christie ↓

Fiorina’s post-debate lead over Christie ↓

↑ How much Fiorina needs to beat Christie

Number of polls before CNN decides→

As a result, Mrs. Fiorina still trails Chris Christie, the current 10th-place candidate, by 3.6 to 2.1, under CNN’s current rules.

Mrs. Fiorina’s 1.5-point deficit might not seem like much, but it’s actually a very big hurdle.

For her to move an average of 12 polls by 1.5 points in the next poll, she would have to beat Mr. Christie by 17 points.

Fiorina Proposal Gets Her Into Debate, Barely

Even after increasing the weight of three post-debate polls to equal 18 polls, Carly Fiorina barely edges Chris Christie.

Fiorina Campaign Proposal

Mrs. Fiorina is banking on a lot more polls than one between now and the Sept. 10 cutoff. But she is outpacing Mr. Christie by only 1.7 points in the three post-debate surveys. At that rate, it would take 10 additional polls before Ms. Fiorina overcame the 1.5-point deficit from the first 12 surveys.

It’s not impossible that Ms. Fiorina would make the debate under the current rules, but it’s unlikely. There will either need to be a lot more surveys or she’ll need to widen her lead over Mr. Christie, and it’s hard to predict how many new polls will come out.

As a result, the Fiorina campaign is proposing a change to the rules. CNN would weight surveys by time: The polls conducted in the three weeks before the first debate would count for one-third of the average, while the polls in the following six weeks would count for two-thirds of the average. It’s a complicated proposal, but the effect would be that the three post-debate polls would count as 18 surveys.

What’s striking, though, is that even this remedy would barely get Mrs. Fiorina past Mr. Christie, 3.63 to 3.33 percent. If she didn’t fare as well in future polls, she could even lose that tenuous advantage.

No matter how you try to work the numbers, her big deficit over the first nine surveys is tough to overcome.